Winant of New Hampshire

An Atlantic Portrait

BY CHARLES RUMFORD WALKER

I

Two weeks before John Gilbert Winant went to England as our Ambassador he flew to Concord, New Hampshire, to address ‘the largest crowd to assemble in Representative Hall within memory, estimated at one thousand persons.’ Half of these persons were New Hampshire legislators; the other half were friends and neighbors — with a sprinkling of enemies, too — from all over the state, who had come to hear his farewell address.

The man who had three times been their Governor told them: ‘No compliment you could have paid me could mean more to me than to meet with you in these Legislative Halls before leaving for England..... It was here that I learned, in the years of the depression, that the social and economic problems that we faced reach beyond state lines and across national frontiers. It was because I understood that, and because I realized that security, a stabilized economy, and peace were essential to the happiness of all people everywhere, that whether in Washington or in Europe I felt that I was still working for you here at home.’

A few days before ’Gil’ Winant, as his friends still call him, took off on the Clipper for Lisbon, I saw him in New York. He talked about the difficult job ahead, of England’s ‘fight for life,’ of the fate of democracy in Europe, but every theme somehow seemed to lead his mind back to New Hampshire. You could see that the years there were what had really moulded him, crystallized his political ideas, developed his talents, marked his limitations — and given him his tenacious convictions.

There has been a lot of speculation about what manner of man we have sent as Ambassador to England. The place to find out is in New Hampshire — from friends, enemies, co-workers, and neighbors.

John Gilbert Winant was born in New York City fifty-two years ago, the son of a well-to-do New York family which had made its money in real estate. His father sent him to St. Paul’s School in Concord at the age of fourteen. From St. Paul’s he went to Princeton, but did not graduate. (The University gave him an honorary M. A. degree thirteen years later when he became Governor of New Hampshire.) At college his preoccupation was with American history and politics, and most newspaper readers now know that he formed a Bull Moose club in college and actively campaigned for T. R. in 1912. His progressive views were too much for his father, who is said to have told the future Ambassador that henceforth he was on his own. Gil returned to St. Paul’s to teach history and to serve a first term as Representative of his district in the New Hampshire Legislature.

Sometime before the United States entered World War I, Winant got himself trained as a pilot. Then he went to a friend. ‘I now have twenty-five flying hours under my belt,’ he said. ‘I am going into the war. Here is all the money I have — please settle my affairs for me if I don’t come back.’ When he left, the friend found that most of the money John Winant owed was for milk, which he’d been buying for impoverished families in the town of Concord.

The public has now been told many times how Winant rose from private to captain in the air corps, and was cited for gallantry under fire. He returned to New Hampshire in 1919 to plunge into politics in earnest. But his aspirations were viewed with intense skepticism by those ‘in the know.’

His debit sheet was drawn up this way: ‘He’s a schoolmaster, a bookworm, a New Yorker, and now he has married an heiress from Princeton.’ (Winant had married his boyhood friend, Constance Rivington Russell of Princeton, New Jersey, in 1919.) Added to these disqualifications, he was a ‘progressive,’ and Senator George Moses was soon to remark, ‘That young cock of a schoolmaster had better watch out or he’s going to get his wings clipped.’

In spite of the cold political climate of the Granite State, John Winant was undismayed, and Ben Orr, a man wise in the ways of state politics and a friend of Winant, gives the following account of how he plunged.

‘He showed up one day at my back door,’ Ben Orr recalls, ‘tall, stuttering, and embarrassed. I didn’t know John Winant at the time, but I’d heard of him. “My name’s Winant,” he began. “I want to run for State Senator from the ninth district.” “All right,” I said, grinning at him, “come in. Let’s talk.”

‘We did talk, and finally I said, “There’s a farmers’ meeting over at Contoocook tomorrow. You might start there.” “Fine,” said John. So we both drove to Contoocook the next morning. The farmers, of course, didn’t know him, and they said, “Why, Ben, we’ve got our man already picked.” “Well, talk to him anyway,” I said. So they talked to John Winant and he talked to them. The more they talked, the more that other candidate lost out. By the end of the meeting they’d switched to Winant. After that John moved on to the next town and did the same thing.’

But there weren’t meetings enough in New Hampshire to catch most of John Winant’s future constituents. So he knocked on doors, talked to prospective voters in cornfields, stopped at the corner grocery. Orr recalls Winant’s spotting a railroad section gang at work as they drove along. Winant got out of the car and walked over. The men looked up from their shovels. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ Then they once-overed each other during a long pause. ‘My name’s Winant,’ he began in his embarrassed way; ‘I’m running for State Senator.’

’You be, huh? Well, what do you aim to do?’

Gil would tell them. He always told them, chapter and verse, what he stood for, never asked straight out for a vote. Someone would say, ‘That ain’t right,’ or ‘I believe like that too.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Gil would say. ‘I just thought I’d stop by and tell you.’

In that election he carried every town in the district except the one where his opponent lived — which he had never visited.

‘ My, what a terrible speaker he was in those days,’ a New Hampshire woman told me recently. ‘ I heard his last speech the other day [Winant’s valedictory to the New Hampshire Legislature]. It was good. But you know,’ she continued, ‘I believe that’s one reason — his serious, hesitating way — that we voted for him. We got so tense sitting on the edge of our chairs, praying for him to find the next word, that we got to wanting him to win. And when he did speak out we knew he meant it, and wasn’t trying to fool us.’

In New Hampshire there’s a whole saga about those early earnest tonguetied speeches. At one rally in a tiny upstate town it is said he didn’t utter a word for a full minute — and his wife fainted.

‘But how could he win their votes?’ I asked Orr.

‘People thought he was honest,’ he answered, ‘and he was.’

II

The physical appearance of John Winant and most of his personal idiosyncrasies have now been publicized to the nation, if not to the world. He is a tall, crag-like man with features that seem to have been cut sharply out of New Hampshire granite. Most of the time when he is at work in his office or receiving a visitor, he vigorously strides up and down with his head sunk forward so that the black stray forelock usually gets in his eyes. He invariably speaks in a low, earnest voice, punctuated by long pauses in which he thinks and strides — and he gives the impression of being more interested in your problems than in his own.

He looks harassed, though, because he has probably been working all night, and he doesn’t take vacations. When he was running for Governor, the late Charles W. Eliot sent for him. ’I have some very serious advice to give you,’ he said. ‘You work too hard. Everyone says so. Work is one of the great gifts, but it can be overdone. ... I sent for you to say this.’ Winant’s co-workers, whom he drives as hard as himself, say the advice was lost.

In addition to this bundle of personal traits, which are as true today as they were in the early twenties, the nation has been told by innumerable radio commentators that their new Ambassador wears wilted shirts with frayed cuffs and usually unpressed trousers. That’s true, too. A week before Mrs. Winant took the Clipper to join her husband in England, his mother called her up. She had been listening to a broadcast about her son. ‘Hasn’t he got any fresh shirts? ‘ she asked. ‘He has plenty,’ the Ambassador’s wife answered, ‘but you know — he forgets. I don’t think we can do anything about it.’

Most of the things John Winant does, as well as the things he neglects to do, spring in the last accounting from the same impulse at the core of him — his liking for people. He likes them as individuals and he likes them in the mass. ‘He really does, all kinds of humans,’ as one of his bitterest critics said to me; ‘I’ll say that for him. He’d rather sit and talk to some no-account person than go about his business. And of course anybody could see him when he was Governor — especially if the fellow had a hard-luck story instead of an appointment. Those of us who had appointments cooled our heels outside his office for hours.’

The governor’s strange attitude about money — not public money — was also a trait that both embittered and won people to him. He set out one day for the railroad station to attend an important conference in New York. On the way he met a woman who had been a scrubwoman at St. Paul’s School. She told him she was out of a job and her children were sick. So he put his hand in his pocket and gave her what was there, it was a fistful of bills. But when he reached the station he had no cash for his ticket, and he had to borrow it from a stranger. ‘You had to watch out,’ soberminded citizens of Concord will tell you, ‘if the Governor asked you to lunch. Most likely you’d have to lend him the price of it.’

After John Winant made a small fortune of his own through varied business investments, — which later the depression of 1930 wiped out, — his range of personal benefactions widened. He would pay his friends’ hospital bills if they were down on their luck, or send their sons through college. Years ago, riding through Texas, where he had some oil wells, he picked up a hitch-hiking youngster. The boy told John Winant the story of his life, and before the ride was over the Governor agreed to send him through college — which he did.

That sort of thing New Hampshire citizens — though it startles them — like in John Winant. But the faces of Concord business men grow grave when they recount how many times the Governor lost his ‘shirt’ on investments. ‘A poor business man,’ they summarize. Others explain his losses a little differently. They say the trouble was that he made investments with mixed motives: for instance, (1) to make money, as any business man would; (2) to help develop an industry that was good for New Hampshire; (3) to help John Doc, or his brother, or his sister, to get a job. A case in point: he invested rather heavily in a New Hampshire road construction company, which in a couple of years went bankrupt; he didn’t mourn long, but said to his partner, ‘Well, anyway we did build some swell roads, didn’t we? ‘ Main Street in Concord submits that’s not a normal business man’s reaction to bankruptcy — and adds that it was not his partner’s.

I make this slight digression into Mr. Winant’s business affairs, which continued in reverse all during the time he was going forward politically, because it’s not in the Gil Winant tradition to conceal from the public anything that’s true. That tradition, I should add, is one of the reasons why New Hampshire people — who have a kind of religious feeling about truth-telling — have always supported him, with or without his shirt.

The thing, however, that puzzles hardheaded and successful New Hampshire executives is this — though they will eagerly admit that it’s true: John Winant’s three administrations were distinguished for fiscal reform and the installation of the most up-to-date budget system of any state in the Union. Further, the Governor insisted on meticulously regulated and economical expenditure of the public monies even during the depression years.

‘How do you explain that,’ they say, ‘of a man who can’t keep fifty cents in his pocket for lunch?’

III

The frayed shirt and hesitant speech, the careless generosity, the devotion to public duty, and the Lincolnesque frame and face are all legitimate touches in any rounded portrait of John Winant, but, oddly enough, just as intimate a picture can be drawn from Republican Party campaign documents, or out of the public statute books of the State of New Hampshire.

Winant’s first run for Governor still lingers vividly in New Hampshire memories. He was thirty-five when he began the campaign, not quite thirty-six when he became the youngest Governor in the United States. He licked Colonel Frank Knox (then owner of the state’s largest newspaper, now Secretary of the Navy), bucked the New Hampshire Manufacturers’ Association, which had denounced the two progressive planks in his platform — ratification of the Child Labor amendment, and the 48-hour law for New Hampshire.

The young campaigner hadn’t the technique of diction or phrasemaking of an F. D. R., but he made up for it by his terrible earnestness and his appeal to facts. Challenged on his progressive views by Old Guard Republicans, he remarked that he had learned his Republicanism from the founders of the party, who taught that human rights must be placed ahead of property rights.

Characteristically, in the inaugural message of his second administration, after proposing certain measures for the relief of ‘distress and want,’ he quietly urged reliance on ‘undramatic and unselfish effort, combined with hard work,’ rather than on ‘panaceas.’ He drew a picture of economic breakdown and unemployment (1931) by quoting an unemotional and objective report of the Russell Sage Foundation; he devoted a third of his speech to budgetary reform of the state’s finances; he urged cooperative marketing for the farmers; he warned against public utilities that were ‘leaving New Hampshire investors with watered stock in an outside company.’ All this — in tone as well as in substance — was stuff which the common people of the Granite State could understand, and approve.

A month ago I thumbed through the Public Laws of New Hampshire enacted during the Winant administrations. Taken together, they reveal a kind of Little New Deal of basic social legislation enacted months, sometimes years before similar measures were passed by the Federal Government for the nation as a whole. A sort of politico-economic foresight is as much a Winant trait as disheveled hair.

Here are a few of the laws in New Hampshire’s forehanded New Deal: —

(1) Old age assistance, a modest anticipation of federal old-age legislation.

(2) Minimum wage regulation, an embryonic forerunner of the NRA codes and the Wage and Hour Law.

(3) Budget and accounting stabilization. There is no good federal analogy. Commenting on it after eighteen months’ operation in 1931, Governor Winant said to the Legislature; ‘The whole plan is designed to prevent the state from getting into financial difficulties by stopping the leaks before they occur.’ He noted that New Hampshire had not only managed to live within the amount of its income, but also wiped out a small deficit and accumulated a surplus.

(4) An act to provide for the emergency relief of distress. This both established the principle of centralized relief and enabled the state government to help out distressed towns and counties.

(5) Early in the depression, legislation designed to prevent foreclosures on farms and factory workers’ homes.

(6) Finally, the ‘Act for the Relief of Towns,’ in its working out a kind of cross between the RFC and the PWA.

Here’s a dramatic example. The largest paper company in New Hampshire is the Brown Paper Company in the thriving city of Berlin. At the depth of the depression the Brown Company shut down; it hadn’t the resources to pay its loggers, and Berlin became a ghost city of unemployment and destitution. At that point the Governor stepped in. He put the state’s credit — which was excellent — behind the city of Berlin. Berlin borrowed money, paid the unemployed Brown workers to haul logs out of the woods, retained a lien on the logs as they were dumped at the company’s door. Promptly the paper company started operations again, reemployed its own men, and paid the city back. This ingenious plan cost the State Treasurer nothing beyond his signature.

Then, under Winant’s pressure, the Legislature passed a series of ‘enabling acts’ early in 1933 in order that New Hampshire might be the first state to receive federal money under New Deal legislation.

After eight years of precedent-breaking social legislation by the Federal Government, New Hampshire’s Little New Deal may look modest to the reader. But remember, Winant’s New Deal was enacted nearly ten years ago — and in New Hampshire.

IV

Campaigning for his second term as Governor in 1931, in the tiny town of Gossville, John Winant was introduced by the local innkeeper as the future President of the United States. He hesitated, looked embarrassed. ‘It’ll take him half an hour to warm up after that,’ his wife whispered to a friend. It did. Those words of the Gossville innkeeper were the first breath of a ‘Winant for President’ boom or boomlet, which was to roll up in 1932 and early 1933 with Young Republican clubs in the Middle West, the New York Herald Tribune, Collier’s, and Time hailing him as the Lincolncsque white hope of the Republican Party. The boom talk died quietly in the spring and summer of 1033, as Governor Winant. expressed open sympathy for the early reforms of the New Deal. Not only did his chances for the Republican candidacy die, but in 1935, after he accepted the Chairmanship of the Social Security Board from Roosevelt, New Hampshire’s Old Guard denounced him bitterly for having sold them down the river.

Today, looking back upon the turbulent thirties, — admittedly with the wisdom of hindsight, — it is hard to see how he could have made himself a standard bearer of the Landon-minded Republican Party in 1936. (He might have led a Willkie-minded one in 1940.) He had fought for much of the social legislation in New Hampshire which later — when applied nationally — was to acquire the New Deal label. Instinctively he welcomed its extension to the whole American people.

His own summary of the five years from 1935 to 1940 is succinct and characteristic: ‘In 1935 I felt that peace was the prime issue before the peoples of the world. For this reason I went to work with the International Labor Office at Geneva. I returned for a brief period to help organize Social Security in this country because I believed that if democracy in the United States was to continue to function it must rest on a fairer social basis. These five years have convinced me that neither peace nor political democracy has been sufficiently identified with the welfare of the common man.’

The job of organizing the Social Security system, with its 40 million clients, appealed to him (1) because he believed in the principle, (2) because it was a gigantic job of ’public administration. Characteristically, he spent several months in Europe meticulously studying the systems of other countries before he returned to launch our own. Characteristically, he saved the government several million dollars of administrative expenses appropriated for registration by having the job done in the post offices. That was a simple administrative idea, but no one else seems to have thought of it.

It was in the job as Director of the International Labor Office at Geneva, however, with a kind of roving commission to observe economic conditions in all countries, that he prepared himself — though unwittingly — for his present appointment. His dominant passion for talking to people — ‘especially people who have no appointment with him,’ his New Hampshire critic would insist — had the fullest scope. He met a good many people by appointment too, including Ernest Bevin, Anthony Eden, and Lord Halifax. Before the war he visited nearly every European country, and he talked casually and met in conference workers, farmers, employers — convinced himself, he told me, that the deepest aspiration of the common people of Europe was for ‘peace and security.’ After the Blitzkrieg he saw those aspirations crushed.

When the Nazis occupied Sudetenland, he flew to Prague and witnessed with his own eyes the crushing of the Republic. In France, he saw the endless stream of helpless refugees and the demoralized armies of the Republic. When I talked to him a month ago he said: ‘All the things you and I believe in, and America stands for, are being wiped out in every country Hitler conquers.’ * What things?’ I asked. He repeated them slowly and sadly as if he were talking about dead friends: ‘I mean basic democratic rights — the right of free speech, the right to assemble peaceably, the right of the free press, habeas corpus, the right of a man to his own body, trial by jury, the right of a man to worship according to his own conscience.’

But John Winant has also been observing with the administrative side of his mind, and meticulously in the last year, the complex problem of how democratic nations are to arm themselves for modern warfare without losing the democratic rights they are fighting to defend — which is a problem both America and England must solve if the war is to be worth its human and economic cost. My guess is that one of John Winant’s jobs as Ambassador will be to report back on how successful England has been in solving that problem.

V

Out of this brief summary of John Winant’s career, I believe three traits emerge as assets of political character: (1) love —and understanding — of the people, which trait, as I have already indicated, may under certain circumstances be a liability; (2) a practical talent in administration; (3) uncanny and unceasing political foresight. These are not the ordinary qualifications one looks for in an ambassador. But since the situation at the Court of St. James’s is today in all respects out of the ordinary, it may be guessed that is why the President picked an unconventional, and in many ways an extraordinary, ambassador.

The third characteristic, his politicoeconomic foresight, may well prove — if democracy survives at all from the war — the most useful of all. Significantly, Winant was among the first to recognize the true menace of National Socialism to our own republican institutions — a long time ago. When others were laughing at the little man with the Charlie Chaplin moustache, John Winant was not laughing. He was indignantly refusing — five years ago — passage to Europe on a Nazi steamship. When the American public was depreciating World War II, Winant was insisting it was not a ‘phony.’ And today, when most of us find it hard to think beyond the daily broadcast, “Winant is saying it is none too early to begin building for the peace to follow the war. The common people of all nations have got to win that peace as well as this war. One reason why he worked so hard to keep the International Labor Office afloat in a war-torn world, he told me, was that he saw it as a fact-finding and planning instrument for a democratic people’s peace after the war was over.

The job he is now tackling will certainly test his granite endurance and his powers, as it would test any man’s. He has plenty of human limitations, but lack of courage in the face of difficulties — both his friends and his enemies will eagerly testify — is not one of them. He works best when the going is tough. It was tough during the depression when he was fighting hunger and distress in New Hampshire, and fighting it with success. It will be even tougher over the next few months in a beleaguered England.

There is one passage from Theodore Roosevelt that Winant is fond of quoting, and I dare say it is now in his thoughts: ‘It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done t hem better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.’

That is a fair statement of John Winant’s philosophy.